Ennobling the Prosaic: Integrated Learning Environments at Thaden School, Bentonville
Marlon Blackwell Architects integrated styles and colors from the heart of American design, from classic cars to farm equipment and barns, with technology and cutting-edge placemaking techniques to shape buildings around a dynamic curriculum.
A Place for Students to Soar
Five buildings in the center of Bentonville make up Thaden School. Each has its personality, form, and function. But a school is more than its buildings. It is the teachers and the supporters, the land, and most of all, a school is its students.
Thaden unites architectural excellence with a flowing landscape and a forward-looking educational model that incorporates making, imagining, and a sense of belonging. It engages the imaginations of students while respecting the nobility of its setting and local culture. Its style has been described as “urban pastoral” by MBA principal Marlon Blackwell.
It took a group of dedicated professionals to achieve the vision. Marlon Blackwell Architects collaborated with the faculty and fellow architecture studios EskewDumezRipple and Andropogon Associates to create a space where students can thrive.
The structures at Thaden are relatable without being mundane. They are rooted in place and history. They speak to the ethics of community. They breathe.
Vision
In 2015, the Walton Family Foundation decided to create a school for grades 6-12 in Bentonville, Arkansas, the town where the prominent American family has its roots and keeps its headquarters. The school was to be a departure from standard models, opening up the learning experience to an integrated landscape and to the community.
The school needed to be a landmark that signified excellence while remaining true to the vernacular forms of the region. It needed to be of the place while signifying the future, both for Bentonville and for the students.
“The Thaden School initiative transcends mere physical infrastructure to become a catalyst for urban revitalization”
—2024 Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize citation
Context
After considering dozens of sites, the team landed on a 26-acre site in downtown Bentonville. At different points in its history, it had served as a fairground for the community and was even the site of a historic high school. Though the buildings were long gone, the land still occupied a central place, both physically and culturally, to the community in Bentonville. It was an axis where the future and past of the city could meet in a present defined by bold placemaking.
Situated in Northwest Arkansas, Bentonville has a humid climate and began as a farming community and a hub for transit to the American West. The city rests on a plateau in the Ozark Mountains and has one of the fastest-growing economies in the nation, with a vibrant downtown and world-class art and culture institutions. It is a place of community, pine groves, and agriculture, of lakes and rolling hills.
Thaden’s campus was to have two campuses divided by a street. On the grounds, the restored childhood house of the pioneering aviator Iris Louise McPhetridge Thaden, for whom the school is named, serves as an administration building. Thaden’s status as an early pioneer in aviation resonates with the school’s missing, and subtle hints at aviation, in the form of roofs and placement of windows, reference this aeronautical legacy.
At Thaden, we set about to ennoble the prosaic
—Marlon Blackwell
Process
Marlon Blackwell Architects brought its extensive experience in the region, and in many ways, the project was a culmination of the locally inflected architecture it had been practicing in the region for years.
The team worked closely with founding headmaster Clayton Marsh. The curriculum of the school came into being in tandem with the architecture. Each building was shaped according to how the school would function.
As always, studio founder Marlon Blackwell began by drawing, balancing a consideration of the landscape with a desire to create statement structures. The studio took a high-tech, high-touch approach, ensuring that the product was rich with detail, economical, and suited to the high-quality learning environment that the Walton Family Foundation envisioned.
Materials
Architecture in Northwest Arkansas calls for humble materials rendered with precision. For Thaden, a combination of wood and metal presents the structures as relatable and down-to-earth, while daring forms signal the presence of real architecture. Aluminum panelling was used for the majority of the cladding on the MBA-designed buildings, except for the wood-clad Bike Barn.
Color plays a primary role. Each building has a distinct tone or pattern of metal paneling, creating differences and texture while maintaining consistency, which is key to the campus's overall identity and an asset in the construction process. MBA referenced the colors and tones of the landscape, using greens and tans, and tested dozens of colors to find the right one. Reels and Wheels both feature the 1967 Mustang Shelby Cobra GT500 sports car’s green-gold metallic finish.
The Buildings
Marlon Blackwell Architects was responsible for four of the five primary buildings on Thaden Campus. Working closely with the landscape program, the buildings have internal logics that promote student well-being and external forms that pitch and roll with the surroundings. Voids, patios, and prosceniums provide clear points of circulation and frame views of the other buildings.
Each building was designed to fulfill a different program, oriented around the real-world needs of the students, reflected in their names. The deeply American form of porches plays a significant role, taking shape in each building in one way or another, from recessed sides to massive overhangs.
Reels: Arts and Administration
38,000 sf
A building designed to house the administrative as well as the humanities and creative arts program, Reels needed flexibility, daylight, and clear circulation inside and outside. Agricultural architecture sets the tone. The drawing process began with a long, gabled form reminiscent of a poultry house that was split, creating a tripartite, Y-shaped plan. The corrugated metal roof was given pitches, slopes, and facets informed by aeronautical design. These slopes allowed for a long clerestory that brings light into the primary plywood-lined interior corridor. Figurative gestures work in functional harmony with the program and site.
From here, the architects carved out sections from the middle of the building to create a passageway that, keeping with the commitment to modern takes on vernacular styles, forms a skylight-covered dog trot that connects the building to the campus and creates space between the academic and administrative zones.
Each end section of the plan connects with the remainder of the campus differently. On one side, where the building meets the interior road, a massive slope lifts towards the sky. This portion has a wood-panneled fascia framing a wall of windows underneath a set of panels that can be used for projections, transforming the adjacent yard into an outdoor theater The opposite side has a cantilevered roof that forms a porch, while the third protruding volume ends in a facade of columns that resemble the teeth of the harvesting machine, cleverly integrated into the figurative and functional program of the building.
Wheels: Science and Fabrication
30,800 sf
The classic Mustang Shelby Cobra coloring is perhaps most fitting for the Wheels Science and Fabrication building, which includes classrooms and a large makers space. Striking in itself, it features similar material and formal moves to Reels. The team took that long, gabled form in concept and used it as a basis, pitching the roof in different directions to create slopes and facets, and carving out the middle to create a dogtrot. However, the building is more straightforward, linear, and true to the direct nature of the mechanical curriculum. When viewed with Reels, the potential for starting with a simple vernacular form and making shifts to create differences while emphasizing cohesion between the buildings becomes clear.
Much of the interior circulation is similar to Reels, with lofty ceilings and simple materials such as plywood interior cladding and polished concrete flooring for a central corridor Both in Wheels and Reels, the simplicity of the material was chosen for cost and reference to local building culture, but also to create a backdrop for thnking. Students in these spaces are encouraged to showcase work and customize the space. This can be seen most readily in the series of glass vitrine shelving attached to the white-painted steel columns that support the high-pitched ceiling and serve as dividers between the corridor and open, collaborative seating spaces.
At each end, variations in the facade distinguish the building. On one side, a cantilevered roof creates a covered porch-like element facing the EskewDumezRipple-designed food hall and event space. On the other side, the portion of the building separated by the dogtrot holds a makerspace. Here, a massive trapezoidal perforated metal screen arcs up above the facade and down to the ground at a slender point. It provides a covered outdoor space for a garage while keeping it open to the street. Informed again by agricultural machines, the screen forms part of a walk that continues across the perimeter of the campus to the grand proscenium of Performance.
Performance: Music and Theater
23,400 sf
The series of charcoal-blue finned pillars that meet the street at Thaden School's Performing Arts Center form a loggia on the Northwest side of the campus, presenting a grand gesture facing out while bringing the tall performance hall down to the scale of the visitor on approach. Like Wheels and Reels, the facade is clad in metal, but here the automotive paint has been rendered into checkered white and gold blocks to reference Osage prairie grass common to the region. An exterior overhang bridges the promenade and the building, creating a grand entrance for Performance and for the campus at large. Inside, high-contrast blue and white walls form the central passageway that also divides the primary theater from the smaller rehearsal spaces.
The theater space sits 260 people and features wood paneling to ground the space. It was made to be extensively reconfigured, allowing for musical and stage performances of different scales. At the back of the space, a single operable window slopes out, facing towards Louise Thaden’s house on the opposite side of the campus—a symbolic gesture that orients the creative nucleus back to the roots.
Bike Barn: Sport and Assembly
9,200 sf
The primary building on the eastern portion of the campus, Bike Barn, stands on its own, presiding over the outdoor sports arenas and a series of trails that connect to the regional trail system. Fulfilling a career-long dream, Marlon Blackwell took the gambrel barn, common to the area, and expanded it, adding a long triangular lip on one side that forms a cantilevered overhang and a tall, sloped trapezoid on the other. The cedar-clad building was painted the classic barn red with a protective finish. Gaps in the cedar ventilate the structure, while at night it turns it into a beacon that mirrors the stark red profile of daytime.
The taller expansion crests up above what would be the apex of the classic form, with skylights placed on the pitch. This brings light into the interior, which features a sports court. Exposed trusses highlight the gambrel barn's classic form, while hand wenches open up mechanical windows accessible from the mezzanine that flanks one side of the space. The ground floor walls are operable to allow for further ventilation during the hot summer months. Only a volume inside for locker rooms was ventilated.
It is a nod to local architecture that defies nostalgia through innovation, providing a place of play, wonder, and connection to roots.
“No structure promises to live larger and longer in the memory of our school than our barn.”
—Clayton Marsh, founding Thaden School headmaster
Landscape
As the building program developed, Andropogon Associates’ landscape design needed to respond to the asymmetrical buildings and engage Main Street. Beyond the porch-like programs on the buildings, there are no canopies or covered walkways. Students must engage with the elements as they engage in the learning process. Winding paths snake through tall grasses and wildflowers, where the students can study natural systems.
The landscape and the buildings work in a way to highlight and not obscure the relationship between the natural and culture-made. Engagement with the landscape and buildings also orients students towards sustainability, and education about the environment as a function of a building creates incalculable downwind sustainability gains.
Sustainability
Starting with the materials, an emphasis on reuse and simple materials that could be easily sourced drove the design decisions. On the campus, rainwater capture systems, low-plumb systems, geothermal wells, and thermal wheels to recover energy from exhaust all contribute to the high performance of the building.
Formal moves help to alleviate the day-to-day energy usage. The expansive clerestory windows in Reels and Wheels both provide plenty of light during the day and eliminate the need for unpleasant overhead or fluorescent lighting. Natural elements in the landscape design program reduce the need for constant lawn care or maintenance.